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Some Ohio State University students are upset that they had no say in picking this year’s spring
commencement speaker, a break with past practice.

Provost Joseph Steinmetz and his Office of Academic Affairs alone decided to invite MSNBC
talk-show host Chris Matthews to speak at the May 4 ceremony at Ohio Stadium. In the past, the
university asked a committee of students and staff for a recommendation. This year, there wasn’t
time, OSU officials said.

“Because of time constraints and leadership changes during the past year, the decision was made
to use a more streamlined approach to speaker selection for spring 2014 commencement,” OSU
spokesman Gary Lewis said in an email.

Amid the search for a new president and other shuffles in top jobs, Steinmetz and his office
made the final decision, Lewis said.

News that Matthews will speak hasn’t been well-received among students, said Taylor Stepp,
president of the undergraduate student government. Complaints about Matthews’s liberal views are
common, Stepp said, but students are equally upset that the university didn’t draw a bigger
name.

“The response from students is simply that we don’t know who this guy is, we don’t care about
this guy,” Stepp said. “And the fact that Mr. Matthews obviously has a very liberal leaning and he’s
not even a public official was irksome to me.”

An appointment to the speaker-selection committee has traditionally been seen as prestigious,
Stepp said. Each year, the undergraduate student government named one person to the group. But
repeated attempts to contact OSU officials about the committee this year were never returned, Stepp
said.

Some have defended the pick. Leaders of the College Democrats group at Ohio State said last week
that they expect Matthews to deliver a strong message, free of politics. University officials
called Matthews one of the most-experienced journalists in the country.

Matthews, the host of
Hardball, follows a string of OSU commencement speakers who come from the political world.
President Barack Obama spoke last year, following Republican U.S. House Speaker John Boehner and
Susan E. Rice, a representative to the United Nations and now a member of Obama’s cabinet.

An agency that represents Matthews did not return calls.

Ohio State plans to give students and staff members a say again and to appoint next year’s
committed by the end of this semester.